YOU’RE ASKING THE WRONG QUESTION

Since Hatzibbur HaCharedi entered the Israeli political arena, one question has come up again and again — where are your endorsements from senior Rabbonim? Where are the Gedolim?

It is a fair question, and it deserves a proper answer rather than a defensive one. To be clear, the party does have rabbinic endorsements, rabbinic leadership, and a Va’ad Rabbanim involved in every policy they adopt. Some have given their approval quietly, for reasons I will come to; others have been public.

But the assumption buried inside the question also deserves to be taken seriously. Charedi Judaism is built around deference to Torah authority, and we do not treat Da’as Torah as a decorative slogan to be wheeled out whenever it is convenient.

But there is also a second Torah concept, no less fundamental, which has a curious habit of going missing from these conversations at precisely the moment it becomes inconvenient. That concept is achrayut — responsibility.

Which is why, if we are going to be totally honest, the question is being asked in the wrong order. People have been trained to ask about the endorsement first, and everything else afterwards, if at all.

But there is a question that needs to be asked, and it needs to be asked first: what happens when leadership, for whatever reason, cannot act publicly, and ‘non-leaders’ are left to shoulder a pressing communal problem themselves?

Truthfully, Jewish history consists of many such moments. Rav Moshe Feinstein zt”l has something extraordinary to say about this exact topic. In Darash Moshe on Parshas Vayakhel, Rav Moshe notices what looks like a redundancy.

Before the Torah tells us that Betzalel is the divinely designated architect of the Mishkan, Moshe stands in front of the entire nation and announces: וכל חכם לב בכם יבואו ויעשו — “Let every wise-hearted person among you come and make it.”

Why summon everybody, when Hashem had already selected Betzalel and equipped him with skill nobody else came close to matching? Anyone in that crowd could have and should have concluded that Betzalel has this one covered. After all, he is the expert, the gadol, which means that this is emphatically not anyone else’s problem.

Rav Moshe says the Torah is teaching us the exact opposite lesson. The general obligation is placed first to establish this fact: שכל חכם לב חייבין כאילו בצלאל לא נתחייב כלל — that every capable person is obligated exactly as if Betzalel had never been charged with the task at all.

Of course there is hierarchy, and ordinarily the katan defers to the gadol. But: כשאין הגדול עושה מאיזה טעם מחוייב אף הקטן — “When the greater person does not act, for whatever reason, even the lesser person is obligated.”

Everything turns on those two words, מאיזה טעם, “for whatever reason.” Rav Moshe does not suggest the gadol is wrong, chas veshalom, for having refrained, nor that he must be mistaken. He does not even ask us to understand why the gadol hasn’t acted. There may well be excellent reasons — pressures invisible to outsiders, or institutional realities which make public action genuinely impossible.

Rav Moshe accepts all of it, but then tells us that none of it makes the slightest bit of difference, because: עצם החיוב הוא על כל ישראל — the essential obligation rests upon all of Klal Yisrael. When leadership is carrying the load, you can and must rely on leadership; but responsibility is never transferred so completely that everybody else is entitled to do nothing ever. If the task is still sitting there undone, the obligation is sitting there with it.

One famous example from recent Jewish history is Sarah Schenirer, the founder of Bais Yaakov, whose grave near Kraków I was privileged to visit this past July. She was a Kraków dressmaker who watched the local girls — frum girls from chassidic homes exactly like her own — assimilating at a rate that terrified her, because the existing system offered them no Jewish education worth the name.

But when she proposed doing something, the response was not what you would call universal applause. Her own brother told her not to do it. He did eventually take her to the Belzer Rebbe in Marienbad, but the Rebbe brushed her off with a curt “berachah v’hatzlachah.”

Those two words were, as her supporters later put it, the only rabbinic endorsement she received before starting out. Meanwhile, the Belzer Rebbe himself declined to let the daughters of his own chassidim attend Bais Yaakov, while the Minchas Elazar of Munkacs took to calling Bais Yaakov “Beis Esav,” and as the movement spread, her emissaries met hostility in town after town, often from the local rabbanim.

She went ahead anyway, opening a tiny school in 1917 with twenty-five girls. And here is what has been left out in all the popular retellings: the great rabbinic approbations did not precede her work but followed it, by a very long way.

The Agudah adopted the school system in 1924, and the famous letters from the Gerrer Rebbe and Rav Chaim Ozer date from the end of that decade. The Chofetz Chaim’s celebrated letter was written in 1933, sixteen years after that first classroom, and it was addressed to the Jews of Frysztak because the rav there was refusing to permit a Bais Yaakov school in his town. And Rav Zalman Sorotzkin’s letter of endorsement arrived in 1941, six years after Schenirer had died.

Meanwhile, in 1917, Sarah Schenirer had zero support. But although she was a deeply traditional chassidic woman who sought rabbinic support wherever she could get it, when she saw a crisis devouring a generation of Jewish girls, saw that nobody else was going to fix it, she refused to conclude that nothing could therefore be done.

Today it is impossible to imagine Charedi Judaism without Bais Yaakov — which is worth remembering when someone insists that approval from the Gedolim must precede action.

It is this framework through which I understand the emergence of Hatzibbur HaCharedi. The new party consists of Charedim who find themselves politically unrepresented, and parents who want a Charedi education for their children while also wanting those children equipped to support a family with dignity.

Among them are Charedi men serving in the IDF who cannot understand why defending Am Yisrael should cost them their place in the community they consider home; and families who revere those devoting their lives to Torah while believing that Charedim in uniform have earned a place of honour too. None of them wants to be threatened, nor to have their children thrown out of school, as the price of doing the things they do.

Beyond them are senior Charedi rabbanim, dayanim and communal leaders who have told me privately that they have considerable sympathy for these concerns, while explaining candidly that the cost of publicly endorsing a party competing with UTJ and Shas makes open support almost impossible. I believe them, and their position is painful.

It is also precisely the situation Rav Moshe was describing: כשאין הגדול עושה מאיזה טעם מחוייב אף הקטן. He does not ask anyone to condemn the gadol or to second-guess him, and I have no intention of doing either, since the reasons for their silence may be entirely legitimate from their point of view. Rav Moshe’s point is different: the problem, whatever it is, still needs solving, and the responsibility cannot be outsourced indefinitely.

He goes further, writing of a person able to accomplish something necessary: כי מה שאפשר לו לעשות הוא מחוייב, כי ע״ז נשלח — whatever a person is capable of doing, he is obligated to do, because this is what he was sent into the world to do — and warning: ואם אינו עושה הוא מועל בשליחותו ויצטרך ליתן דין וחשבון, that if he fails to act he has betrayed his mission and will have to give an accounting.

So I do not think the question is where the Gedolim are. The question is what the rest of us are doing while something that desperately needs doing goes undone, and the people we would ordinarily rely upon cannot do it.

It’s a question that cannot be delegated, and on the strength of Rav Moshe’s closing words, every one of us will one day be asked it by someone considerably more authoritative than any of the new party’s critics.